His election as mayor of New York, a Democratic city was almost certain. Eric Adams, African-American, former police officer and anti-racist trade unionist, is the new mayor of the economic and cultural capital of the eastern United States, the American channels CBS and NBC announced on Tuesday (November 2).
This centrist of the Democratic Party will have to continue the work of his predecessor Bill de Blasio, who, despite his unpopularity, piloted the city of more than eight million inhabitants in the storm of the pandemic that brought it to its knees (more 34,000 deaths).
Defeating Republican rival Curtis Sliwa, Eric Adams, 61, is the second African-American mayor in New York history, after David Dinkins (1990-1993).
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During the Democratic primaries in June, which opposed him to the progressive candidate Maya Wiley, he showed himself as a strong leader, defender of the middle and popular classes, at the forefront against racial discrimination. The ex-policeman also promised to be tough on crime.
Even though numbers remain at historically low levels, shootings are up 73% since the start of the year, and a series of incidents in the metro have recently increased the pressure, with backing from local channels and tabloids.
Budget of 98 billion
Rather attached to the right wing of the Democratic Party – unlike the far left New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – Eric Adams is known to be close to the business community of « Big Apple » (“Big Apple”), the financial lung of the planet.
The mayor of New York indeed manages the largest municipal budget in the United States, 98.7 billion dollars (85.3 billion euros) for the fiscal year 2021-2022, devoted in part to the end of the crisis sanitary. He has control over the country’s largest police force (NYPD, 36,000 employees) and the huge public education system strained by Covid-19.
In addition to the end of the pandemic – despite the opposition of some municipal officials to compulsory vaccination – Eric Adams will have to manage a maximum of files: maintaining the opening of schools, return to normal in Manhattan where thousands of businesses are closed and office towers remain half empty, glaring social inequalities, poor housing, infrastructure in poor condition, bad weather … Not to mention the expected closure of Rikers Island, the terrible overcrowded, ultraviolent and unsanitary prison.
“A pragmatist rather than a leftist ideologue”
Born in Brooklyn to a poor family, having flirted with crime in Queens as a teenager, before joining the police force in the mid-1980s at the age of 25, he spent 22 years there until the rank of captain. In 1995, he founded a union that fights against racism and marries a political career in the Democratic Party, where he was in turn any senator from the State of New York and president of the Brooklyn district, springboard to New York City Hall.
The new mayor will have to continue the reform of the police accused of having in his ranks violent, racist and corrupt agents, but without alienating his former powerful body of origin. The NYPD has been widely singled out, including through legal complaints, for the violent crackdown on anti-racist Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, following the murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
But Eric Adams is “A pragmatist rather than a leftist ideologue”, points out Columbia University political scientist Robert Shapiro, and rejects the slogan « Defund the police » (“Cut police funds”) chanted in 2020 by the American left. Becoming vegan in 2016 to treat his diabetes, the future mayor of New York – he wrote a cookbook -, would also like to convince African Americans to do the same.
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